Tag: desert

Around the island again

After a rainy Sunday it was only natural to go someplace that is know for a lack of rain – the desert. It just so happens there is a small desert in the south of the island. I’m not really sure if it really is a desert, but it sure looks like it. Large sand dunes stretch couple of kilometers around at the seaside in the south.

Mespalomes dunes

The dunes were surprisingly large, it took quite some time to get on top of one.

Sand dunes

Drinking water

Almost dead

Running to try and get in place before the photo is taken. No luck.

The dunes

Original

The town of Maspalomas is the most touristic area of the island, full of bars, hotels and restaurants. After the dunes we hiked around the town before going back to our apartments. For most of the time we cooked for ourselves, I think in total we ate outside 3 times, and all three times it was paella time.

Paella

Sadly it wasn’t as good as the one Veronika and I had in Valencia couple of years ago.

On Tuesday we went to visit the main city on the island Les Palmas, the city is located on the far north of the island. It is quite large, almost 400.000 inhabitants, so larger than Ljubljana. We visited couple of stores and hiked alongside the main beach. Aside from few interesting shops there wasn’t much to do here and we were happy we picked south of the island for our vacation.

Learning to surf

We first thought it was actually a person pretending to be still for money.

In the afternoon, instead of taking the highway and going down the same way we came up, we decided to go around the island. Again, the roads quickly became narrow, cutting into the edges of cliffs high above the sea. The views were amazing though.

Cliffs on the west side

Cliffs on the west side

We had to go over some mountains to get to the other side

Strangely middle of the island was almost all the time covered by large dark clouds.

Port for ferry to Tenerife

We stopped at a couple of places along the way. At the most west part of the island there was a iconic traditional colored lighthouse.

The westernmost point of Gran Canaria.

It took us half a day to get back home again. Along the way, from time to time, we saw this funny traffic sign, alerting drivers about donkey-cow, sadly we did not see any live specimen of the animal depicted.

1/3 of a way

After 6 hours of flight we’ve made it to Abu Dhabi. We are on 1/3 of the way. The fight was nice and calm and I was able to see the dessert for the first time through the plane window. Sadly it’s already night here, so not much to see. The airport is enormous, we walked for about half an hour to get to our terminal for the next flight.

Well not much time to waste, our next stage begins in less than an hour, about 13 hours on the plane. :/

Desert over Iraq/Iran.

On the plane.

This is the first time we got metal flatware.

We fley with Etihad airways. Very nice that they have USB and “normal” chargers on each sit. Is very good during long flights.